Windows/Mac/Linux: If you're tired of your browser crashing and killing your 2GB upload, you may want to consider Neembuu Uploader, which features automatic download URL generation, (and deletion URLs if the filehost supports it) login support for filehosts where you have accounts, upload histories, and the ability to drag and drop files from anywhere onto the Neembu window to begin uploading. More »

Windows/Mac/Linux: If you're a coder and haven't tried the free, cross-platform text editor Komodo Edit yet, you may be in for a treat. Komodo Edit supports a wide range of scripting languages and boasts powerful customization and extension options for easier coding. More »

Windows: Spending a half-hour slowly downloading a huge Zip archive only to discover it's corrupt is a pain. Avoid it with Zip2Fix, a utlity that won't fix corrupt archives, but will extract any and all undamaged files from it. More »

Windows: Dropbox is one of our favorite ways to share files with others and synchronize them between computers. If what you need to share is a screenshot of the active window or your desktop, try the Dropbox Screen Grabber. More »

Android: ESET Mobile Security is a full suite of security and privacy tools rolled into one app. Full-phone antivirus and malware scanning, call/SMS/MMS blacklisting, and a host of anti-theft features are all accessible from the main screen. As if that weren't enough, the app also has built-in system monitoring functions to show you every running process along with its resource usage. The app's in beta at the moment, but it runs as smooth as it looks—and it's free. More »

If you're still waiting for Android 2.3 Gingerbread, we recommend checking out CyanogenMod 7. It not only brings Gingerbread to tons of Android phones, but other great features like canned SMS responses, over- (or under-) clocking, and a new simple theme engine. More »

Android: If you've been unhappy with the way Dropbox's mobile app only uploads files manually, you'll want to check out Titanium Media Sync, which will constantly sync folders from your phone to Dropbox, just like Dropbox does on the desktop. More »

iOS: Sign Me Out is a helpful iOS app that'll let you remotely check up on your Gmail and Facebook accounts to see if you're signed in from any other locations. If you are, you can click a big red sign me out button to disconnect a potentially unauthorized user. More »

Android: If you'd like to be able to tell who's emailing, texting, or calling you without even taking your phone out of your pocket, free app WhoIsIt will let you assign specific ringtones and vibration patterns to each contact on your phone. More »

Android: Google's Reader webapp is pretty good, but we've longed for an official, native Google Reader app since we started using Android. Today, Google made that dream come true, with extras like volume-key navigation, multiple accounts, and sharing. More »

iOS: Fooducate is a handy, free little app that scans food product barcodes and provides you with health and nutrition information. If the product doesn't meet your health needs, Fooducate can offer up some alternatives. More »

Windows only: We recently featured Universal Androot, an app that rooted many Android phones, but had a few limitations (and Google's already killing it with a patch). Windows program SuperOneClick is the easiest, most universal rooting app we've seen yet. More »

Windows only: CCleaner Enhancer updates the popular system cleaning utility with support for cleaning up after 270 more applications, so you can keep your system even more crap free. More »

Android: There are a lot of popular utilities for Android, from task killers, app switchers and beyond. Smartbar combines multiple useful utilities into one simple app and puts them in your menu bar for quick access. More »

Linux: While the main idea behind Chrome OS is pretty cool, you may not want to limit yourself to only webapps. Pepprmint Ice is a Linux distribution that is based on webapp usage, but allows the installation of native apps. More »

Chrome: While it's easy to organize your Gmail inbox with stars and the trusted trio of labels, sometimes it's still hard to tell why a message was important. Chrome extension Gmail Notes annotates messages and sync your notes with Google Docs. More »

Live CD: If you've been meaning to make a comprehensive backup of your system but available tools seemed a bit too arcane and command line dependent, Redo Backup is a Linux Live CD with a simple user interface and easy to use tools. More »




Backup - Compact Disc - Utilities - Site Management - Operating Systems

Canonical's latest endeavor, somewhat confusingly called Ubuntu Light, is an instantly-on-and-connected netbook and desktop solution. It's new "Unity" UI sports many of the features Mac users have come to know and love, built for easy browsing and window management. More »




Ubuntu - Operating system - Canonical - Ubuntu Light - Unity

Windows/Mac/Linux: Next time you get the urge to rearrange your furniture, don't strain your back randomly shoving your sofa around the room. Download Sweet Home 3D and do the heavy lifting on your computer screen before moving a stick of furniture.
This slick free interior design app recreates the dimensions of a room, and displays the furniture you add in 3D. Drag and drop tables, chairs, and plants around the room until you find an arrangement you like. Drop in windows, doors, and even change the color of the walls to replicate your room as closely as possible.

If you happen to have a blueprint available of the room you're redecorating, Sweet Home 3D will accept an import of the file in BMP, JPEG, GIF or PNG formats. Sorting through the furniture is easy—it's arranged in a tree view, just select the room you're decorating and drag what you like onto the 2D room grid. The app displays a 3D representation in real-time in a pane directly underneath. Check out an overhead view, or walk through the room as a virtual visitor for another perspective.

If you want to try out Sweet Home 3D before you download, there's an online version you can try out for free. Register to save any plans you create, or play with the app without signing up. Check out the video below to see Sweet Home 3D in action.

Sweet Home 3D [via Download Squad]

Windows only: LookInMyPC generates a complete report of what's going on in a computer—from hardware to software, and everything in between. After playing around with it, this writer wouldn't start troubleshooting a PC without it. I'm not kidding.
Whether you're a tech guru who knows your way around your computer better than the company that built it, or a novice just getting acquainted with your system, LookInMyPC is a free app you'll want to download and run at least once, even before you need its diagnostic help. It's like a big verbal X-Ray of your PC, detailing everything from the brand of network adapter you have to the number of user accounts on your system.

Everything that a LookInMyPC report generates can already be found in your computer's accessible files if you know where to look, but this utility makes it so much easier. Just open the system inspector and tick the boxes to select all or some of the more than 40 diagnostic checks you want it to perform. Seconds later, you'll have a long report outlining every detail LookInMyPC ferreted out for you. Stash it in a drawer with your computer's owner's manual for a fast and handy reference sheet the next time you need to know what brand sound card you have or what the specs are on your processor.

LookInMyPC is also a great tool for diagnosing computer issues, especially if you're troubleshooting an unfamiliar computer. Instead of spending time poking around your uncle's PC to figure out basic system information, just generate a general report with memory and operating system information, then get down to business. Once you have a feel for what issues you're trying to correct, you can generate more specific reports like Registry Run Entries or Firewall Info. LookInMyPC even gives you data on Windows updates, recent System Restores, and the default email client.

The utility won't make any changes to your system at all, no matter what issues it identifies. The reports open up in a browser window and many of the results—like system hardware vendors and application names—are hyperlinked so you can quickly Google-search things you don't recognize.

One really nice touch that's included in this app is the ability to generate a report that automatically turns itself into a ZIP file and emails it to the address of the user's choice. That's a huge help when you get a distress call from a relative who wants you to troubleshoot his computer remotely.

LookInMyPC is designed to work with Windows 2000, 2003, XP, and Vista, but we ran it on Windows 7 with no issues. Pair this app with screencasting webapp ShowMeWhatsWrong and you'll be the neighborhood PC go-to person in record time. What apps and tools are already in your troubleshooting toolkit? Know of a similar solution, like previously mentioned SIW? Tell us in the comments.

LookInMyPC [via Addictive Tips]

Windows: Ever download a movie from—oh, I don't know—some far-reaching nether-region of the internet, and when your download finishes realize the video is split into multiple parts? AVI Joiner quickly combines those split videos in just a few clicks.
Using it could not be easier. Just run the app (AVI Joiner.exe), drag and drop the files you want to join into the Files to be joined pane, make sure they're in the correct order, and click the Run AVI Joiner button. The app will ask you where you want to save the joined video (name it and make sure to add the .avi extension to the end), then sit back as it fires up a command line and starts the joining process. I joined a couple of 700MB files into a 1.4GB video in roughly a minute.

This awesome little app was built courtesy of the Lifehacker Coders group over at the Productive Geek forums. You can currently grab the download hosted over at drop.io here. We reached the download cap—get the ZIP here instead. (For a portable version, grab the AVI_Joiner.zip file; if you want an installer, grab the setup.exe and install.nsi files. Make sure you grab the newest versions, and if we happen to hit a bandwidth cap at drop.io, be sure to let me know.)

AVI Joiner is a free, open-source application for Windows only.

Let's do a simple AHK project together: AVI joiner [Productive Geek]

Windows: If you want to print a large image off your home printer and be able to reassemble it, it takes some enormous photo editing cut 'n crop patience—or a copy of Easy Poster Printer.
Photo by Paulo Barcellos Jr..

Easy Poster Printer works on a simple principle: your image is divided into sections and fed to your printer chunk by chunk so the end result is a stack of segments that can be reassembled into the large image. The process is commonly known as tiled-printing or rasterbation. You can use online services to create tiled images such as previously reviewed The Rasterbator and Block Posters. Both are great services but they don't allow you the level of customization afforded by Easy Poster Printer and they require you to upload your image and thus have less control over it and less privacy.

Easy Poster Printer lets you tweak the size of the final image, the orientation of the image, the paper used, the print quality, and how much overlap there will be between images for clean border-free alignment. The default set of page sizes is all metric but you can easily add in your own imperial paper sizes—and since you'll likely not be using anything other than 8.5x11 and 11x17, it's not much of a chore to manually enter the sizes.

Easy Poster Printer is freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool for getting more out of your printer? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Easy Poster Printer [via gHacks]

Windows: If you like your software open-source, you'll definitely want to check out UltraDefrag, a snappy open-source Windows disk defragmenter.
UltraDefrag is available as a portable application and in a GUI and ultra lightweight command-line only version—the lightweight version is designated as "micro" in the download list and is at the top of the screen, make sure to scroll down for the GUI version if you want to interact with the program like in the screenshot above.

With UltraDefrag you can defragment your entire disk, defragment based on the file and folder—handy if your disk defragmentation is limited to a handful of frequently edited and altered files—and set it up to defragment during the boot process to access files Windows usually has locked.

UltraDefrag is open-source and available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows. Have a favorite tool for managing your disks? Let's hear about it in the comments.

UltraDefrag [via DownloadSquad]

Want a wall-sized satellite view of your neighborhood? A full-page street map of the town you're visiting? Google Map Buddy, a free, portable map maker, grabs data from Google Maps and arranges it exactly how you want it.
When you un-zip and run Google Map Buddy, it asks you to choose your Google Map nationality, then opens a browser to let you search out the location you're looking at. Once you get there, hit "Select area," then draw a rectangle around the area you want to capture. After fine-tuning the zoom level and hitting "Create Map Image," Map Buddy goes to work grabbing, tile by tile, your area's map. It generates a generally high-resolution PNG of your area, and provides the individual map tiles to keep and arrange yourself into a larger grid, if you'd like.

The software itself can be described as "picky"—you have to "X" out any particular business or destination that pops up in a dialog box on the map, and after zooming in on the Google Map browser to your destination, Map Buddy asks you for a deeper zoom level than what you've already set. So it's not an elegant tool, exactly, but it does deliver the very printable, full-picture map of your destination.

Map Buddy is a free download for Windows systems only, and doesn't require installation.

The Google Map Buddy [Augmented Reality Software via The Red Ferret Journal]

If you're looking for a way to organize all the information you find and research you do online, and you've had enough with bookmarking, copying and pasting, and cobbled-together techniques not cutting it, Zotero is a comprehensive information manager for Firefox.
Zotero is, at its heart, a citation manager. It was designed to facilitate research and to make organizing and including that research in essays and publications pain free. As such, it's an excellent tool for any scholar, researcher, or student to have in their toolbox. Its utility extends well beyond preparing to write a paper, however, as it allows you to grab nearly anything off the web and insert it into the Zotero system. The following video gives a quick overview of some of Zotero's features:

If the overview video caught your interest, read on and check out some of the other great screencasts to see the individual features in action.

Getting Items in Zotero

You can add items in a myriad of ways to Zotero. From within Firefox, just click the Zotero icon in the address bar, on the status bar, or hit CTRL+ALT+Z to activate Zotero. You can add nearly everything on the web from books—Zotero will add in all the information about the book automatically—to highlighted portions of web pages, to full out saving entire web pages for future reference. Unlike bookmarking a web page, Zotero saves the page just like you would save it to your computer. Thus when you go to reference it later on, even if it has moved or been deleted, you still have the images and text archived. In addition to capturing information from the web, you can supplement your Zotero archive by adding files right from your computer like images, HTML documents, PDFs, and more.

Organizing Your Research

Zotero allows you to organize your research into collections. The collections are highly flexible and an item can belong to multiple collections simultaneously. They use the analogy of the playlist—and it's fitting—you can "mix" your research into as many collections as you need. Your Zotero library is the master collection of all your research, and from that research you can pull citations, clippings, PDFs and so on, and create a collection representing your current area of interest or research like "19th Century Medieval Literary Criticism" or "Potential Markets for Growth". Collections are easily modified and even shared.

Word Processor Compatibility and Citations
Although Zotero was built to facilitate researchers using Firefox and working on the web, the system—through the use of plug-ins—allows you to work in your favorite word processor using Zotero. They've made plug-ins for Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and NeoOffice. If word processor support is a deal breaker for you, make sure to check out their word processor compatibility chart. Check out the Word integration in the video below:

As the video shows, inserting citations and even changing them in-text is easy. You're not just limited to citations in word processors however, you can drag and drop citations right from Zotero into any text box. Zotero comes with a built-in library of common citation formats like AMA, APA, Chicago Style, MLA—over a dozen by default. If that isn't enough you can dip into the style repository and select from hundreds of alternative citations styles. On the rare chance you can't find a citation style—and it would be rare!—you can hop over to the Zotero support forum and put in a request that they add it to the archive.

Syncing Your Research and Files

Nobody wants to lug around a computer or flash drive and risk losing all the research they've done. Zotero has multiple channels for syncing your data to ensure your research is safe. Zotero syncs itself to the servers, if you have it installed on multiple computers you can sync all the instances of Zotero through the Zotero servers, and to further replicate your data you can share it with friends through the Zotero group system so that your joint research is stored across multiple computers.

Zotero is a complex yet easy to manage research tool. Fully intended for academic research, you can use it outside of academia to manage your research on any topic from nearly any source on the web. Our overview here highlights some of the best features of Zotero, but a quick browse through the support section on Zotero's web site will show you even more capabilities and innovative ways people are using Zotero to help wrestle with the enormous amount of information web-based research provides.

If you have experience with Zotero or just have a research tip or trick up your sleeve, let's hear about it in the comments.